Climate, climate shocks and child nutrition in Africa’s diverse farming systems

Beliyou Haile, Carlo Azzarri, D. Heady and Liangzhi You

No 275928, 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Notwithstanding improvements over the last several decades, food and nutrition insecurity is still widespread and progresses made have been uneven. In Africa, the central and western parts scored the lowest and highest reduction in malnutrition, respectively. This regional heterogeneity is expected given the spatial variation in (inclusive) economic growth, agro-ecology, market access, the prevalence of diseases and infections, as well as institutional and policy environments (e.g., social protection systems) that affect the various dimensions of food and nutrition security. At the same time, climatic and weather changes are expected to worsen in the coming decades with potentially devastating effects in the region, given its heavily relies on rain-fed agriculture and the market and institutional failures that limit the set of coping and adaptation strategies. This study examines the linkages between climatic shocks and child undernutrition in the diverse farming systems of Africa. We examine effects of climatic changes not only through yields (agricultural mechanism) but also through vector-borne and gastrointestinal diseases (health mechanism). Preliminary results suggest significant heterogeneity in the incidence of child undernutrition and the effects of climatic shocks by agro-ecology and farming systems, meriting further investigation we are currently undertaking to disentangle the role of each mechanism.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Farm Management; International Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/275928/files/2438.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae18:275928

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.275928

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().